Seeing some people tell horror stories about how they’ve gone “above and beyond” made me think about my own story about learning that managers, especially in large corporations, don’t really care about workers, they only care about productivity.
This story is from a few years back. I had been laid off from a major office supply chain after the dot com crash in 2001. After a few years as a concert & event stage hand, I went back to my old store which had different management and employees. I was hired as a graphic designer/desktop publisher in document services and the department manager told me that he rewarded employees who proved their worth. In fact he really emphasized proving my worth, so I set out to do that. The last desktop publisher had left everything in disarray. No real filing system to speak of and he had walked with half of the accounts. I spent a month redoing everything and getting it all set up nicely. I backed up everything and made new example books. The manager said he really appreciated my work, and I was really stoked to rock the graphic design chair.
The department manager also did graphic design. After I cleaned everything up, I started spending less and less time at the desk doing what I was hired for. Instead I was doing more and more boring and menial production work. My last week there, all I did was bitch work. My last three days were spent drilling holes in reams of legal-sized paper for the entire shift. 8 hours, punching holes. It became clear that the manager just hired me to do what nobody else wanted to do.
There was a department meeting the following Sunday. Instead of going, I emailed the manager and told him that what I was doing was a waste of my time, and his time since he hired me as a graphic designer. I told him that I was resigning effective immediately and I expected the company to mail me my final check. I never got a response from him, but I did get that check. Not too long after that the company was bought by Office Depot and that location was shuttered. I think it’s a children’s gym now?
If you find yourself in a similar situation, where you are not being valued as an employee, don’t think twice about peacing out. You don’t owe employers more than your labor. You also don’t owe them two weeks notice. If they aren’t respecting that labor, go somewhere else that will!